


food for the soul

by politicalmamaduck



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Eating Disorders, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Soulmates, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-16
Updated: 2018-05-16
Packaged: 2019-05-07 20:35:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14679003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/politicalmamaduck/pseuds/politicalmamaduck
Summary: Rey struggles with new food and the knowledge that Kylo Ren is her soulmate.





	food for the soul

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SouthSideStory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SouthSideStory/gifts).



> Written for SouthSideStory as a gift in honor of her donation to reylotrashcompactor's [GoFundMe](https://www.gofundme.com/ivf-for-mer-and-kat). Please let either of us know if you are interested in receiving a gift fic in honor of your donation.

_The Force works in mysterious ways._

_The Force works in mysterious ways_ , Rey kept telling herself.

She repeated it over and over as she threw up the remains of her dinner, emptying what little remained in her stomach as quietly as she could. The walls on the Resistance’s new base were thin, and she didn’t want anyone to know how much trouble she was having with new food. Finn was away, having accepted a new assignment from General Organa. Poe was busy with the new pilots, including a recovered Rose, who was learning to fly to honor her lost sister. Leia was as busy as ever, and Rey did not want to add another burden to the general’s already lowered shoulders. Food and troops were scarce enough on their small moon, removed as they were from the central hyperspace lanes. They were not far from Crait and D’Qar, but far in the Outer Rim, removed from the Core and the destroyed Hosnian system.

She tried to meditate like Master Luke taught her on Ahch-To, but she couldn’t concentrate. She was shaking, whether from the lack of food or from the knowledge she couldn’t process, she did not know.

At night she tossed and turned, alternating between shivering from cold or burning up, sweating in a hot flash. She was aware that her body needed time to adjust to new climates, new environments, but even on her hungriest days on Jakku she never hated her body so much for betraying her.

And beneath the physical struggle was the mental, spiritual, emotional. The turmoil in her stomach compared to the battle she waged with her own mind.

She managed to close the Force’s bond between them on Crait, but after delving into the ancient Jedi texts with the help of C-3PO, R2-D2, and BB-8, whose memory banks she slightly altered, she now knew a deeper truth.

The Supreme Leader of the First Order was her soulmate, and his fate was indelibly linked with her own.

_The Force works in mysterious ways._

Rey was so hungry the next day at dinner that she ate nearly everything in sight, then spent the evening throwing it up again, just like the day prior.

As she lay in bed again that night, once more unable to sleep, her thoughts drifted across the galaxy. Somehow, she knew he couldn’t sleep either. Putting him out of her mind once more, she resolutely determined to visualize the island, to feel the salt spray on her skin, to breathe deeply and become one with the Force. She would find her balance again, she just had to keep trying.

She finally fell asleep, her thin blanket tangled around her legs, her throat sore from throwing up, and tears crusted in her eyes.

 

* * *

 

As a child Ben Solo read ancient Alderaanian love poetry and dreamed of the day he would find someone he could love as much as the poets loved their muses. They yearned for their soulmates the way he yearned for his parents’ attention. As he grew older, he gave up on the idea that he would be his parents’ first priority, but dreamed of writing Alderaanian poetry for his soulmate.

Kylo Ren barely thought about his parents, his soulmate, or Alderaanian poetry. When he did, it was only to lament how he never truly possessed that which he wanted. The Supreme Leader was too busy for such trifles anyway. He had to deal with the interminable Hux every day, and an endless litany of problems. The First Order had invested most of its capital in the _Supremacy_ , the _Fulminatrix_ , and Starkiller Base, and all three were gone, destroyed by the Resistance, which they in turn failed to destroy. Flames of rebellion had lit across the galaxy, and there were not enough competent officers to control and put out the fires.

At night he struggled to sleep as he always had, but his dreams were queer of late. He dreamed of Rey, no longer at peace on her island, but ill, in bed and shaking.

She had not appeared to him in his waking hours since Crait, but he knew it was only a matter of time. The Force worked in mysterious ways.

 

* * *

 

It was Rey’s third day of eating to make up for everything she had lost the night before, then voiding it in the same fashion, when she heard a voice behind her as she knelt in the refresher.

“You can’t keep doing this, Rey, and you know it.”

It was a voice she thought she would never hear again, that she thought she had closed herself off from; the last person in the world she wanted to see.

Her soulmate.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” she said, not looking behind her, but only down at her own reflection in the toilet.

“I know,” he replied, more gently than she expected. “But I’m here whether I want to be or you want me to be or not. The Force isn’t done with us.”

“I know,” she responded, getting up from the toilet and washing her face and hands. She caught a glimpse of him in the mirror; he looked as exhausted as she felt.

“Rey, you deserve more than this,” he said, at which she finally turned to face him.

“What do you know about what I deserve?” she spat back.

“You’re strong with the Force, stronger than you want to admit. You’re wasted here with the Resistance, hiding, running, pretending to fit in with everyone else. You’re not alone, but you can’t tell them about what happened, can you?”

“Did you tell the First Order the truth?” she asked, narrowing her gaze at him.

“No,” he answered, looking at her, then down to his feet. “I blamed you.”

“Good,” she replied.

Kylo disappeared, looking sadder than ever.

 

* * *

 

 _I am one with the Force, the Force is with me_.

The ancient Jedi library in the Temple on Coruscant was not entirely destroyed by Emperor Palpatine; ever the pragmatist, though he disdained Jedi teachings, he realized the value of such an archive, as well as its utility as bait to trap any Jedi who may have survived the purge.

Ben Solo went there once, with his uncle Luke. It was a sad, desolate place since the fall of the Empire; the New Republic guarded the site, but since Coruscant was no longer the galactic capital, its priorities laid elsewhere, and it was not as well preserved as it should have been.

Kylo Ren knew it would hold the answer to his question, however, and to appear with the support of the citizenry, to do homage to the ways of old on Coruscant would do much for the First Order’s propaganda machine. He hated politics, but his mother taught him well. He hated to admit it, but Hux’s pompous, bombastic speeches served their purpose. He too could play his part for the Order’s greater good. And so he met with Coruscanti officials, appeared in public, all while hearing the Temple’s siren call. It was a temptation, a lure of the Light, but he would do what needed to be done.

It was in the dark of the night, a night that could never truly be dark with Coruscant’s trillion lights, that Kylo Ren howled with rage and would have destroyed the entire chamber in which he was sitting if only his scholar’s heart would have allowed him to do so. The text he was reading was nearly four thousand years old and irreplaceable.

Snoke had lied, as he always had.

He had not created the bond between Rey and Kylo.

They were soulmates, as Revan and Bastila Shan had been before them.

Kylo Ren stalked the halls of the former Jedi Temple, the plundered Imperial Palace, the empty home of the Force, crying for the love he could never have, for the boy he had been, for the galaxy that was as broken as his soul.

 

* * *

 

Rey awoke once more with a hollow stomach and cheeks, aching all over. She could feel profound anguish in the Force, and she couldn’t help but wonder what on earth could have happened to make a man who killed his father and his master and abandoned his family for galactic dominance so profoundly sad.

She sat down in her small room and realized again that she and her soulmate were not so different after all.

She ate breakfast slowly, carefully, sipping on some Gatalentan tea and spent the morning meditating and training. She felt the ghost of a sparring partner dancing with her in the training room, matching her blow for blow, aggressive, tenacious, and powerful. Her equal in the dark and the light, her counterpart, at once her strongest enemy and closest friend, the one who knew her secrets. She knew his body as intimately as she knew her own, his mind was open to hers, he was her soulmate and she was his and they were one, just as they were in Snoke’s throne room.

The Force flowed through them, buoying them despite their exhaustion. They drew on its depth and on each other, swinging their blades ever more gracefully, ever more intensely, testing each other, learning from each other as they had twice before.

It was a song, a dance they both knew all too well. He would strike there, and she would strike there. Their hearts, their breathing, their movements perfectly in sync, complementing each other even as they fought for dominance.

Rey was the predator, and Ben Solo her prey. Here, she saw no hint of the darkness that followed him, no pretense or vanity. Here, he was hers, and hers alone.  

 

* * *

 

Kylo Ren returned to the _Finalizer_ without sleeping. After he left the Temple on Coruscant, he went hundreds of levels down to a seedy, dark cantina filled with various species and as many smoke hazes to match. The liquor certainly wasn’t top shelf, but it was cheap and burned the way he liked it. An Aqualish bounty hunter made the mistake of attempting to pick a fight with him after Kylo had downed a few drinks, and soon the cantina floor obtained a few more bloodstains and the proprietor obtained a few more credits.

Upon his return, he swept Hux and the other generals out of the way with the Force, and let loose in a training room until he was laying on the floor, drenched in sweat, his vision swimming. He was exhausted, but could not sleep; his body was too full of nervous energy, and his heart raced from his training. He looked up to see Rey also practicing her forms.

He joined her deadly dance, with her through the Force in the way he could not be physically. Their blades met over and over, casting purple lights on the floor and walls and deepening the shadowed hollows under their eyes.

She was as thin as ever, but looking better than she had the last time he saw her. Her fighting had certainly lost none of its intensity. She pursued him as she had on Starkiller, as she fought Snoke’s Praetorian guards. She was an angel of death and destruction, and he had never seen something so beautiful, so perfect, so deadly, in all his life.

The ancient Alderaanian poets could not compare with Rey of Jakku whirling his grandfather’s rebuilt saber in the darkness of a decrepit Resistance base in the middle of nowhere, across the galaxy from him.

He swung low, towards her waist, and she parried his blow, spinning away from him.

They stood, breathing heavily, looking at each other, not saying a word.

Rey faded away from him, and Kylo Ren sat up on his training mat, covered in sweat.

 

* * *

 

That night, Rey was able to eat a manageable amount at dinner, and kept it all down. She felt refreshed after stretching and showering before bed, and slept the whole night through, dreaming of the island, the porgs cooing to her and the scent of saltwater.

She dreamt of a lover’s kiss, of a gentle hand undoing her buns. She felt desire curling her toes and pooling in her core, of a body entwined with hers, a heart beating with hers, lungs breathing with hers.

She awoke feeling relaxed and at peace for the first time since Ahch-To.

 

* * *

 

Kylo Ren hadn’t slept a whole night through since he was a child, if ever.

That night he collapsed in his bed almost immediately after stepping out of the refresher, feeling exhausted from the day’s events and those of the day prior.

He dreamt of Rey, at peace on her island, reading ancient Jedi texts. He dreamt he was writing Alderaanian poetry once more, reciting it to her and his mother. He taught her the ancient braiding art, plaiting her hair in honor of her Force sensitivity and to show that she was the partner to the heir to the throne.

He awoke the next morning, and ordered his ship readied.

He had never been to New Alderaan. He wasn’t sure how to get to Rey’s island, if she would ever share that information with him. She was still in the middle of nowhere with the Resistance; his nightly dreamscape visits to her had not revealed their location. But he was sure that the mountains and balmy blue skies of what should have been his homeworld would help him obtain the peace he sought, even without her by his side.

He thought Rey would like it there, if she ever chose to visit.  
She would find him again; she always would. She was not yet ready to accept his offer from the _Supremacy_ , and he had to find his own peace. They had accepted their truth with their last duel, and he had no doubt the Force wasn’t yet done with them.

**Author's Note:**

> A huge thank you to my dear friend Celia/crossingwinter for her beta help in making this piece the best it could be. Comments and feedback always appreciated! You can find me on Tumblr as well; please do not hesitate to contact me there if you are interested in a gift fic in return for a donation to the above linked fundraiser.


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